Solo founder, $80M exit, 6 months: The Base44 bootstrapped startup success story | Maor Shlomo

Transcript from https://podmenti.com/t/8269b9207e582be5

In six months he went from zero basically nothing to selling this company for eighty million plus dollars to Wix. The funny thing is that base forty four for the first time in my life.
Was not trying to build the biggest thing ever. Me and my guestfriend, we were on a plane. I told her, Hey, you know what? If we get to one point five million till the end of twenty twenty five, we're gonna buy a nice crowd. And we got there in like four weeks. I feel like the journey that you've been on over the last six months is kind of like the dream for a lot of founders. How long were you actually solo?
The First Person started a month and a half before the acquisition. So I think it's a different ball game because even if you feel solo, you're literally managing teams of AIs writing code. I don't think I've written a single line of HTML or JavaScript in the past three months. You're competing against very well funded companies. Lovable, bolt, replet, verso. How'd you get your first ten users? I started with three users.
Really close friends. But you got them to sit down with me every other day around the table and they would use the the tool. They will try to build something. It will break. I'll take a look and then just build it for them. I'm not gonna try and scale anything.
Before I know that users enjoy it, and and the best metric to to seeing them enjoying it is that they're starting to share it with someone.
Today my guest is Major Shlomo.
This is a unique episode because I almost never have conversations with early stage founders.
I made an exception because Mayor's journey is in many ways the dream for a lot of founders.
Mior started a company called Base 44, which is essentially a more advanced vibe coding tool. Six months later, just a few weeks ago, he sold the company for$80 million to Wix.
He's a solo founder. It was just him for most of the six months.
He never raised any money, he bootstrapped it and built it purely off profits.
When he launched it on Product Hunt, it got so much love that the Product Hunt algorithm thought that it was bots. When it was really just people from all over the world wanting to support the product. In our conversation, Mayor shares exactly how he grew the product from zero to ten to hundred to hundreds of thousands of users, his tech stack that allowed him to move so fast.
Tools that he uses to be super productive as a soul founder with severe ADHD.
Also, the super important insight that everyone needs to hear about how he came up with the idea and then refine the idea.
Also just a bunch of common growth tactics that he tried that didn't work for him.
And some key advice for anyone looking to start their own bootstrap company.
A big thank you to Noam Segal and Amir Klein for suggesting topics for this conversation.
If you enjoy this podcast, don't forget to subscribe and follow it in your favorite podcasting app or YouTube.
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Mayor Schlomo.
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The answers you need to move confidently.

Mayor, thank you so much for being here. Welcome to the podcast.
I am so excited to do that.
Thank you for having me, Lenny.
It's my pleasure. I don't actually do conversations like this often.
with early stage founders.
But I'm really excited.
to be doing this because I feel like the journey that you've been on
over the last six months it's kind of like the dream for a lot of founders.
Uh, especially founders that don't want to build massive teams, that don't want to raise a ton of money.
Basically the journey you've been on is
Build a product.
People loved it. It grew like crazy. You didn't raise any money. You sold it for
Eighty million dollars, we'll talk about this uh six months in.
And
I know it's not all rainbows and butterflies and this amazing, you know, happy
moment to moment all day, but I know it's a lot of hard work.
But this is just what a lot of people want to achieve when they start a company.
And
You're just in the thick of it right now. Like you've just announced your acquisition. So I feel like this is
A really unique point in time.
To extract as much wisdom out of your head as possible. We'll be the right time to kinda like the flag to bed. And uh Yeah, I think there's gonna be many more times. This is a a really unique time.
Let's start with a couple of basics. Just what it what is base forty four for folks that aren't super familiar with the product that you built.
Base forty four is an AI AI up building platform, meaning that you are able to use natural language to describe what you want to build and up, a game.
Uh
um a website or something like that.
And then have AI code it for you.
One of the first ones doing that. I think it's a very
Uh crowded category.
But I think baseball takes a very different approach, a very opinionated one.
Ah for and one that that users or users like to call it a butter is included approach.
uh which means that for every app that you build in base forty four, you already have built in included
a database, integrations, user management, analytics
um without connecting field party services or bringing or API keys and so on.
And I think it helps a lot when you're trying to scale a vibe coded application.
uh to be very complex and very functional.
And so yeah, I think
for most of the category nowadays, they're doing a fantastic job one with building react web apps, like front end web apps.
And then when a user needs um some bacon stuff.
Uh they have a great integration with Superbase. Superbase I think is the most common
Kind of like thing that that most competitors use.
Um, and honestly all of them are doing a great job with the integration, but there's the nature of an integration I
think it's potentially slightly
uh less strong than building everything full stack built in.
And once we did that and actually
uh I engineered the the endpoints and the SDKs and w whatever to work well with LLMs.
think base forty four does a really good job with
Building
Very complex and functional.
Real world applications.
Okay. Uh I wanna talk about the origin story of just like how you even realized that there was an opportunity here. Clearly it worked out.
But before we get there, let me just share a couple of stats about this journey to give people a sense of just how crazy this is and add anything I'm missing.
So in six months he went from zero, basically nothing, to selling this company for eighty million plus dollars to Wix.
Uh it took you three weeks to hit a million dollars ARR.
You bootstrap this business, I think you put in a few tens of thousands of shekels, not even US feelers.
You have something like four hundred thousand users right now. You're solar founder.
uh there are two different wars involved in the journey. You're based in Israel.
So you have to deal with that and we're gonna talk about some of those stories.
Any other stats that are worth sharing, anything else that's important high level before we get into the origin story?
No, I don't think so. I think uh
It it like looking back it sounds
Uh
Insane, but mostly this is it.
Okay.
I love that perspective.
How did this start? There were two things I think that
Drove me to it.
One.
My girlfriend needed like a website to capture leads. She has like a small business, uh she's like an artist.
And I try building that with like
One of the tools Saladell for website building, not an AI powered one.
And it was such a pain.
Trying to do that. One kinda like designing with the drag and drop and everything and then
Things get messed up in mobile and you try again and it's like
Then how do you manage your data and set one and and
And in my previous company we dealt a lot with LMs.
And when while I was doing that, I was like, it doesn't make any sense. I know models can write
The code
to do exactly what I'm trying to do right now. Like build a website from my Gearphone or build like slightly more complicated than a website was actually a web app.
Um I no models can do that. I just they don't have the right infrastructure to do that. So like if I set up an infrastructure for like, hey, here you're the leads go to the database, uh like
Okay, you can write react code and it will serve it and it will be great from an SEO perspective and so on.
Then I'll note as like
It's gonna be super easy and she can do it on on her own.
And the other trigger.
I was
volunteering to help with the scouts organization here in Israel.
Um, with like everything that has to do with like uh system and software and then and back office systems that that they needed and
And back then the like it's a huge organization, by the way, really huge, like tens of thousands of people.
Um
And they have many as as any other organization in the world that we're constantly living at, has many self tour needs.
And so every time they needed to build something, they didn't have any internal devs, you know, any software engineers. So they'd reach out to other agencies and agencies usually would quote them like a million bucks.
Just to build something that I knew people could build.
I was and still, by the way, a huge fan of tools like Retool.
So like uh the previous
Uh wave of like no code.
uh tools, but then those tools were really more of like low code tools, right? You still needed to know some JavaScript, something to make the world to have the interruption, right?
And again, also back then I was like
I know for the software and systems that they want to build.
I know it could be done, it just
LMs can write that and we can really empower the organization to build all the different tools that they want. Just
Give it the right setting.
I need for soccer, so the D L M has access to you.
A database maybe to another LM to be like the the
Up on double F I
uh to have some user management, to have all those kind of things that it needs, but it can translate the user needs to actual code.
Um so
Those two were tweakers.
Back then
Um I started a company seven years ago called Explorium.
very different than baseball before very much like enterprise top down sales
uh in the data space
Uh very capital heavy. We raised a hundred and thirty million dollars.
I was a CEO for seven years.
Uh then when the October seventh will
Uh po
I went to Zeus for like almost a year.
And then when I came out
When to travel the world a bit just to to take some time off.
And when did you do what I was like?
What I like the most, and I haven't had a chance because exploring ghoul and ghoul.
I and haven't had a chance for a while to do which is uh coding. Wanted to get back to building and get my hands dirty.
And so
I had those like given those experiences both with my my power and my gifts and then also with the scouts.
I was like
Let's take a shot at it and start the product that I know is gonna be very very fun to build.
And I think when you're approaching it this way and like
Not the usual way of like, let's raise a ton of money and try to own the category.
Uh, and I knew I'm always getting into a very crowded category. I also knew that I have like some
some different angle and some different take on the category.
Um
But when you're approaching it this way is like there's not a lot to lose. I think it gives a lot of energy.
Um, and that's how base forty four started. It definitely
Definitely didn't think it's gonna take off so fast.
Um
But yep.
That's pretty much about it.
Okay. I like that you don't take credit for the work you did to help it take off so fast. I'm excited to talk through that.
Just first a few maybe takeaways from what you just shared.
of how this idea merged for folks that are looking for ideas.
Uh one is clearly you're solving somebody's real problem, your own problem.
Helping your girlfriend build this
This uh website for her.
And then working with this uh the scouts program in Israel, basically building them software. So
So I think that's a really important takeaway. You weren't just like, Hey, maybe this will be useful to someone, it's
I have a real problem and you I wanna solve it and nothing out there is good enough, so I'm gonna build it myself.
Uh the other is you said that you're having fun.
Feels like that's an important element, just like
You should enjoy it. You shouldn't feel like it's some kind of drag.
You know what? I feel like
In
Like when I was a Philstiner when I first uh was started my my first company exploring, I felt like uh many smart people told me
Those two
Very important truth.
Uh is like build something that that
you would want to use all that you'll actually use
And make sure that throughout time you keep doing something that you really like. And so when your first timer, or at least for myself
When I heard those kind of things, I was like, Yeah, those are cliches. Business is always always important. Let's increase the revenue, like let's close more deals.
Um
And
I feel like like those are even though it sounds like a cliche.
It's so much easier one.
building something that you actually use. So I actually tried solving both problems. Like I was
building the the product and at the same time developing those those two products for my govern for the scouts.
Uh and later on also for other friends and family, and we'll get to that. That's how I got kinda like my first couple of users.
But super important to build something that you use, you'll move forward so much faster.
Uh but also doing something that you love.
I think
I was the CEO of Exploring for seven years. It was such a fantastic experience. It had so many highs and lows.
But at some point at some point it goes.
And it took me too much time to realize that what I really like doing is just building products and scamming products and not necessarily
like being a CEO, managing sales, managing HR, managing all those kind of things.
Um I think that that gives a lot of power, like
It's it's
Easier to walk very hard.
Uh when you're doing something you really like.
Let's follow that thread and talk about being a solo founder.
I think this is something a lot of founders
Like, you know, it's hard to find a co founder that
out of the blue when you have an idea.
Uh
Why C famously doesn't like
Solo founders.
So I think there's a lot of power in what you've achieved.
So let me just ask you first of all
Any I guess lessons about being a solo founder?
that you think would be helpful for other pe people?
Considering starting company on their own.
And also just how do you stay productive? How do you get stuff done?
And solo founder using AI.
One solo founder and specifically bootstrapping
It's not for like I don't think it's suitable for every use case. Right? If you're building like a B to B company, especially if you're like doing a B to Enterprise company, like
You'll need to hire a salesperson or a sales team. Like you'll need to like spend your money on marketing. It's gonna be very hard to try to sell to your company.
when you're on your own and nobody knows if the product's gonna stay there.
Two mouths. So I don't think it's like uh
Divide setting for every company.
I feel I feel like if you're building something that has the potential to be viral
uh to target the masses. And so it doesn't really matter if you're like funded or not. You just like build a great product that people will share if you're able to do that.
And you were able to get out of like the escape velocity of of getting to product market feet.
Then everything is better doing a solo boot flop than than the other way around.
Why not like
Even from a
pure cold angle of like the financial outcome.
Obviously if you're able to bootstrap your business and and
And again get out of like the escape velocity be possible to some degree then
You'll likely
generated financial outcome that's I think
For most cases way better than than any other any other thing.
Second is so
Not specifically the solo, but the bootstoping thing.
Less stressful. Like you wake up in the morning as like you feel profitable and and there's like I think there's like this term uh default alive.
It's so much easier. I've done both.
And the weight of uh raising so much fund
Even if your investors are data, my investors were awesome and they were always supportive and so on.
But even so
I feel like
uh being bootstrap
like no other money except of yours in the business and the d and the business is going and and and
Profitable.
I feel like can can keep the energies up. And I think they keep like one thing that I've learned from my previous company is like energy is also important.
Usually it's a marathon. For me it was a sprint. I thought it's gonna be a marathon, but you wanna do something that you like for wheels and nails and if you are if you're able to show up every day.
And your chances kind of like
goes up immediately.
Um
But then there's like a lot of
A lot of downside and a lot of stressful moments doing that.
Um one.
Just keeping the self go up, keeping the service up.
when you're solo, you don't have a DevOps team, you don't have Uncle
Don't have anything.
I think is really tough.
I had
A few accidents that that really I'm I'm joking about that but I say my friends like shortened my life a bit with just like the stress. Um
I had one sunny now I look at it as a funny moment where
Um
I was
And my brother's wedding.
And we were doing the photo shoots.
And I was actually the one actually was was supposed to also do the ceremony.
And then doing the photo shoots, I have a friend from MIT calls me up and he's like, Hey, somebody hacked into base forty four.
Um
And it's like a crypto scam.
And you've gotta take care of that because
People are building apps on top of base forty four and they're putting the data inside and so on.
And I remember like hanging up the phone. I was like, Okay, I I'll take a look at it immediately. And I remember hanging up the phone and saying
I know.
Why it's such
It's it's karma. I know for a fact it's true. Somebody probably hacked into that because what are are the chances that on the
Only night that I'm not able to open up a laptop and handle that
Uh, this is what happens.
Um and so I I I
Full out there, some excuse and like I have to go and like practice towards the ceremony or something like that.
open up a laptop, spend two hours, two very scary hours of my life. It ended up being
Just the LM.
Tried using a package.
called cryptography, which is like an an N Node.js, like a JavaScript package. Has nothing to do with crypto.
But obviously the the user, not the technical user, saw this error of like, hey m something cryptography or something like that was surely someone like a crypto scam hacked into
Into the app.
And so you have a lot of those
Like moments that
The whole thing is like you're not able to share it with anyone.
share the building even or the stress or put anyone on top of it and say, Hey, you know what? I'm out for today. Like you handle that.
In my previous company.
My two co founders we were really good friends.
Like great friends.
And even if the
One of us would mess up.
Then still would have someone to share it with.
And run jokes around and like
And and just
Be it with someone, so when your solo it's hard.
Um
And then
Brutal privatization, which is something you have to do because you have to
Keep up the face.
of the product. And obviously nowadays with AI and like everyone can deal software, like you have to go extremely fast.
on one side and on the other side figure out marketing along the way.
And
And how to do that and every time.
I remember that every time I had this uh ceremony where I'd start a day.
And try to
Look inside and ask myself
What do I need to work on today?
And what do I wanna walk on today? So what I wanna wanna walk on today it was always like I want a code.
Like that's what I like to do. Let's improve the product.
I know there's like a bug that that uh uh makes like annoying some of the users. I know there's like the feature that that's in my head that I'm saying, oh
competition haven't thought about that. I have to build it. I have to put it out there.
To be in front of everything.
And then it's like
what do I have like what do I have to do today? And so at many different stages on on base forty four's journey, it was
I know I can like improve the product a lot, but I need to do some more marketing.
Oh, I need to like I know this is not the bottle, like I know people are like converting well, they're growing, retention is looking good.
And it's all about just
Like increasing the audience even though I know like I need to like even though I want I really want to work on the product.
And so
I think it is like this uh contact switching is hard.
Yeah, and the last piece obviously is
I was spending a lot of my time
On making sure that my setup
Like how I code how I write content and so on is
optimized and everything is automated and so I spent a lot of time
thinking and agonizing about how to structure the code repository.
Uh, for example, so that I can use
Uh cancel the full back end and base fully full full front end to light light code really fast.
Um
And this was like really important for me to keep kinda like
trying to find out new ways of like how to automate and increase the pace of like building solo. Because if you're able to correct that or like
smaller teams with a lot of context nowadays can can move faster.
And the same goes also for marketing is like and and for for other tools.
Well you want to automate as much as you can, especially when you're solo, because time is gonna be like the the thing that kills your business if if you're not managing it right.
Okay, let me follow that thread. That's a really interesting topic.
Uh so
What is in your stack of productivity?
For yourself and then just
that allowed you to build base forty four just like the tech stack of base forty four.
So you said cursor.
These forty four.
What else did you use day to day that helped you be more efficient?
So I have severe ADHD.
And so it's it it can also be like a superpower, but then you have to like first
the the first thing you wanna do is like make sure that your
Your woke day looks like uh like that you can be focused and that you get like a lot of like deep woke and so
I has a product called rescue time, which I delayed but I think it does like a bunch of other
But it's like
shuts down every access to Twitter and LinkedIn and so on. D this was really hard because
I was starting to like uh do this building public, which turned out to work pretty well for base forty four, and so every time you want to s like
Take a look at your post or see kinda like how many likes and
uh like impressions and so on, but then
Like you can't vote on anything else and so
Uh
I had this fill set up that that
really p like allowed me a certain set of software software tools that I can use
to manage kinda like deep walk.
Um
Kelsey has been awesome.
Base forty four, not only did like the work for the front inside, but also a lot of like the business apps that I used.
Well, on top of base forty four, so
where I'd manage users and give credits and
and well write content and then like I had this app where I kinda like at the start of the week would write
uh some like high level content ideas
And then the the base forty four app will take it and break it down to s kinda like something that sounds more like me.
uh for a LinkedIn post and then I'd I'd approve that and then it would break it down to like a Twitter post. And so I wrote things that were were like really customized to
My process and what I wanted to do.
Which really helped. But I think you can do that not only with baseball before we just
Yeah. You can
Vib code your way.
into like productivity tools that really fits what
you wanna do and and what kinda like the process for you looks like. And I had f so
Again, for example for my uh
Uh social posts and so on. There's like a posts that I would follow and maybe no one else would would would follow that.
And so Vibeco, the custom map for that.
Was Lily
was really helpful.
Let me actually ask about that. That is super cool. So you built basically internal tools.
For yourself using base forty four.
People can use other tools potentially.
So you built one that's like help me craft a tweet.
Well how does that actually look like what is the input? J that sounds really interesting.
So the way that I I like to walk is like
I would have those uh moments where I'd have inspiration for like a piece of content. I so the way a Google based forty phone, probably a different topic, but
was a lot around building in public and going in audience, um and speaking to my audience were which were fellow builders.
So it was really easy. So a lot of that was like around showing on like the base forty four journey.
Um
And I'll have a pauses that I'll follow is like a right down
before that on a piece of paper, like some ideas that I had for like post for throughout the week because'cause you wanna keep consistency and keep put putting quite good things out there.
And then
My process before the app was like I'd go to Chet GPT or write like a very vague kind of like uh structure or skeleton of a post and tell it like hey
Uh fix my writing, improve my writing a bit, and then Ch PT will spill out something that
was like too far off, too much, like too salesy and not my tone, and then I'll say, No, keep closer to the original and we'll fight about that. And then like remove the emojis.
The hyphens look weird.
And so I'm so okay, I'll have now my my my LinkedIn post and I'll need to generate an image for that. So I'll go to a different tool.
And then I'll take this LinkedIn post and now okay, I need to like put it out also in my Twitter account. So okay, let's break it down to a Twitter thread. Now
You need to shorten the like it's you need to make some adjustments to the content and so
I've taken this entire process, which I think was like what was working for me.
Um, and just
Vibe coded a lap around it.
Uh to help me speed it up and then made sure that the LLM inside the app
was using my own tone of voice and was saving the previous post.
To understand how it looks like.
Like what are the posts that I really like that I've written beforehand so that in the next post it will speak
Just like me.
This might be a good plug for base forty four. So like say someone were to go to base forty four.com and try this out, what would be a prompt you'd suggest, like how would they get started building a tool like this?
Usually what it'll do
Is
I'll
Right down I think LMs nowadays do a very good job with like start it vague. It's gonna build the skeleton for what you need and base forty four does a good job with us, like understanding at least the big pieces. Okay, there's gonna be an LLM writing the content is gonna be this and that, and so
You don't have to like write the entire spec, it's just like something like hey
I wanna build my own content generation, AI powered tool. Uh here's my process currently.
And my process is doing this and then LinkedIn and then Twitter
Write something to support that.
And then from the reiterate.
And also something that I really like with
With the entire category again, not only base forty four, I feel like there's tons of tools doing a great job, but something I really like in base forty four is that like
You can because it's really easy to change the software
It's like you get this adaptive software as like as you improve your processes or maybe your processes change.
Uh it's like you adapt it. So like base forty four got acquired by weeks um two weeks ago and so
Now the process of like putting content out there looks a bit different. And so with just two prompts
Or you could change it to support your new process, which is really fun.
That's a cool phrase, adaptive software.
Uh I heard malleable software is another way to describe this.
Let me I want to talk about growth, but a couple more things real quick. This idea of bootstrapping
I'm curious.
So essentially you're competing against very well funded companies.
Lovable bull replit V zero over sale.
Uh
Cursor raises, I don't know, bazillion dollars at this point. I know you're not competing with cursor.
Directly if you weren't
gonna be acquired by Wix. Did you think did you plan on raising money? Do you think you had a chance?
staying bootstrap competing against the folks that everyone's
You know, the more popular
Products today.
Base four if it was like
very profitable, much more than than what I thought. So even if like
Even if I wasn't getting acquired, I feel like I can make
Good money out of that.
It ended up late. I remember we
I
I had like a very failed
Product hands launch at like mid January.
And then
started writing some uh like started building in public at around the start of February and that's where he took off.
And then started like I think Fils dollar or like the the Fils ten or a hundred bucks worth towards um.
And then in May
I already did uh close to two hundred K in profit.
Um so
I think
Uh I think
I don't wait, or it was like a woman.
To compete.
And
Even though it was smaller was seeing that the
The users that come to me stick
Like that come to base forty four, stick with base forty four, even though they're very familiar with like
The rest of the competition
The challenge was obviously
Making
As much noise as the other folks.
Uh so you can see like the other vibe coding tools doing like a million dollars uh hackathons and so on, and they're doing an awesome job on growth, really.
Uh
But I didn't have the resources, so
I tried finding ways to fight.
The fight, uh, I think we had a very successful
Hackathon for Good, which turned out to be a great ghost engine.
And also did
good in the world which like we had three thousand teams just building some
Great, uh do good.
Uh ups.
But also
To be very honest, I think part of the reason to get acquired
Is because this market has
been moving so fast. Faster than anything I've seen. Faster than what I've I thought it's gonna move.
And at some point I feel it's gonna be
Like
you see base forty four grows and you start thinking, hey, this can really help people with their life, like this
This is like one of those self tool categories that
I'm saying that I'm very not objective, but I feel like can really move the needle for a lot of people. I've been seeing people build like fantastic, awesome things.
And so I was like
Let's go for the
Like the big one, let's try and and actually build some global scale, maybe leave the category, maybe win it.
I felt like the best chances to do that is to
uh partner up with weeks. There's like plenty of reasons to that. We can we can touch on that later, but it's like
Same DNA, same customer base, like they know what they're doing, they're seeing and and obviously like very good connection with with the entire management team over there.
And so I I feel like the acquisition
Again, being very honest, I felt like it's gonna be a financial success either way.
But the acquisition is like taking a stance and saying
You know what? Let's let's
Let's play in the big league.
And and and let's uh punch down, not only punch up, uh when when fighting in this very crowded space.
Uh and that's part of the reason why to get it quiet.
That was really insightful. So part of the
Part of what I'm hearing is
you could have stayed independent and made a really good income and built a really good business.
At least for a while, who knows what would have happened long term.
Uh but it
If a as a solo
As someone that's never raised money, you can
make significant income doing something like this in a crowded space.
If you have something that people love that enough people love. So I think that's a really interesting insight. Like it's okay if there's a bazillion
Dollars in funding going to competitors. There's a lot of there's a big market here.
Yeah, I think it's a bit different ball game right now. I was like I was killed many times. Like I I thought how how am I gonna go go into the fight those companies that
One.
Some of the fastest going companies ever.
Again, they're like great teams and very well funded and a lot of money being poured into.
Um but then
Like throughout time I saw that I'm able to keep
the pace, you've not even have the like a faster pace and have like a different angle.
And and it's not changing over time, so like nobody's like
And so I think it's a different ball game because even like if you're very s a very small teal or even if you're solo, like you're
You'll literally managingly
teams of AIs like writing code. I don't think I've written a single line of like
HTML or JavaScript in the past three months, but still like the base forty four front end changes a lot because
uh AI writes that. So yeah, if you if you have an interesting angle and you're able to move fast
I feel like
Money and funding is not necessarily the
de facto to win a category?
And that's gonna be like and and that's gonna change even more drastically in future. As LMs get better as like people
Right.
ten X engineers would have way more impact. There were gonna be a hundred X engineers because they're able to manage
I Lemps and it's not necessarily the team size nor the funding.
Uh that that will be able to win you a category.
What you just shared is amazing, that you've haven't written any
You said JavaScript HTML in three months, which is half the lifetime of this company, which sold for eighty million dollars and and more, potentially.
It feels like now the big
things you gotta get right is kind of like at the beginning of figuring out what problems to solve.
And being really good at understanding where the gaps.
And then it's distribution.
Marketing, getting people to be aware that you exist and give you a shot.
And even distribution, I'm still learning the arts. It's like it's uh it even distribution nowadays it's very different. And and also in favor of like the solo
Not necessarily the solo, but like not necessarily that you're gonna pull
A lot of money on paid campaigns, like
Uh base forty four goal.
With
Close to zero marketing budget.
uh two thousand dollars on an influencer post that didn't really bring anything and then try paid for like a couple of thousands of bucks, um, didn't really work and so everything was like organically
and building public and so
Even distribution is very different. But yeah, if you have an
Interesting take on an domain.
Base four default Phil Steel was one of my best friends. Like we grew up together.
And up to
Few months ago, he was a restaurant manager.
Um, and then he left and started like a SaaS company for managing invoices for restaurants. So
This is a guy that has both distribution. Obviously this is a very local
Like software and company.
uh but has distributions, like has those connections, but has a very deep
Domain knowledge. And now that like the technical he has no
I
She did.
human coding are like very different in the very different places.
Um and so I think if
Like the main knowledge become.
Oh oh domain expertise and some again interesting take on a domain.
or or a product or a category becomes like a key thing.
And then distribution
Yeah.
That's a hard one to get.
Uh, but also Wall that's changing a lot.
Yeah. And I I love that you did it with no funding.
The other thought here as you're talking is it feels like
You could have kept doing this and made money and lived a great life.
But there's this question of how ambitious do you want to be.
I've gone through this myself where it was like, Oh, this newsletter is just I'm making a living off this writing one email a week.
uh I could do live really well just doing this.
But then I'm like, Oh, why not do a podcast? Why not do another podcast? Why not do some other stuff?
And I the reason I do that is it just like it s keeps boring to do something the same way forever.
And there's this opportunity that's out there. I'm like, I should do that.
Uh and I feel like
Some people are on it. I just don't need that. I'm good. I'm gonna live in
I don't know. F GM just coded, make a hundred, three hundred, five hundred K a year.
From this thing.
But I feel like folks like you, like there's more ambition and one way is raise a bunch of money, another sell.
So company that has a platform that you can build on.
Yeah.
I emphasize w with this a lot, but the funny thing is that like base forty four for the first time in my life was not trying to build the biggest thing ever.
So I remember like when I started exploring my previous company
I was so
Um
like so hung up on like let's raise the most amount of money in the least amount of time. I remember that I showed like
And then I looked kept looking like hey, uh Explodium raised a hundred million dollars before Snowflake. This is insane, this is amazing and so on.
Um
And I did that for seven years.
Um
And
I think base fortified is the first time that like I stopped and said
You know what, I just want to go back to do what they really love.
Which is just building a product. I don't care if it like if it wins the category or not. I don't care if it's gonna become really big or not.
Um
I remember when we
When when me and my girlfriend c got back from like the trip to Asia.
And we were on the plane, I told her, Hey, you know what?
If
If we get
to one point five million. I don't remember why I said exactly this number, like if we get to one point five
Million dollars in the
uh till the end of twenty twenty five
Ah, we're gonna buy a nice car.
Uh and we got there in like four weeks. And so it was the first time of like saying
Let's not try and build the biggest thing. Let's just do something I really like.
Um, and let's just build a product that I'm gonna enjoy building.
But then at some point it got to be very, very successful. And I think it comes with like once you've seen success and you're seeing like true positive impact on people, then you're saying, Okay, you know what?
Let's go for the like let's play the big league.
Um try to scale it.
That uh so aligns with my journey. I
Similarly, I'm I'm just gonna do a newsletter. Life's gonna be great. I'm not gonna build I'm not I I call that my anti empire. I don't wanna build anything big, I'm just gonna keep it chill.
Project chill, project avoid getting a real job. That's what I called it.
And I think that is a really big insight.
Some of the best stuff comes from
Not putting a bunch of pressure on yourself trying to build something huge.
Uh and just following a poll.
Following your interests, following
Uh just that insight you have ends up being
Some of the best ideas come out of that, and the biggest ideas.
I love it. I agree with that, yeah.
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Let's talk about growth. So here's what I wanna do. I wanna talk through just how you got
The first
users of base forty four. So I'm thinking maybe how did you get like the first ten users? How'd you get the first hundred users? How'd you get the first thousand users?
What are the the levers used there? What are the tactics? So let's start with ten. How'd you get your first ten users?
Just begging people close to me that I feel like that I have uh
That they have really good connections with.
Uh to use it. I feel like there's no other way
And maybe there are other ways, but um
Again, I was very new to like
Uh
B to C, like to consumerish
Type of product.
And so I grabbed well I started with even three.
Use those.
Like really close fluents.
Two of them back at the time I caught them in like a
part of their life where they were unemployed.
So I was like, Hey w why don't you try build a SAS?
Business or something like that.
And so three really close friends.
Um well somehow I got them to
Sit down with me every other day.
around the table and they would use the the tool. They will try to build something, it will break. I'll take a look, I'll take a look at the logs. I'll go back to my computer
Try to change it, push into production and then
Just build it for them.
It's like
Plenty of people m are lucky to find
maybe a method that consistently walks
For your like ten, a hundred, a thousand.
Uh
Users and then from there.
But
I
try to look at it as like milestones and so
First I was like, I'm not gonna try and scale anything.
Be fully know
that uh users enjoy it and and the best match if to seeing them enjoying it or or at least making value out of it, even if they're not enjoying because there are plenty of bugs and slowness and so on.
Is that they're starting to share it with
With
Someone so I haven't invested anything in marketing.
Before
I felt like okay for the first three or five or ten friends
At some point they started sharing it with their friends.
Like well like you'd see, okay, there's like one new users today and then two new users today and so on. So once it started happening, even on very low percentages, because
Uh, based for default turned out later.
in its journey to be very viral. But back then it was like an okay product.
People loved it and and all liked it.
And started sharing it with that. And so
Once
I started seeing that this works.
Uh, and we got to like ten users, where were all my friends and then and then the eleventh user or something like this start seeing people that don't really know me.
That's why I knew okay, now it's time to invest in marketing or try to launch this thing or try to like get more people to use it because
If you try to do it beforehand, I feel like you're gonna waste a lot of time and resources.
on just like having a very evolving dome where you get usels in and usels out, you will not be able to to
And unless you have like a lot of money to invest in paid.
So that like it makes sense, then then it's very hard. I knew that I'm not gonna do that. It's like a product that I'm building, I want it to be profitable from the get go and not
feeling bad for investing too much money into your paid and so on.
And so I knew that it has to be viable.
some point I saw it starting to look like it's viral.
Then
I did a very failed very bad uh product on the launch.
Uh but also now looking back and saying this is completely fine. I feel like people
Some sometimes treat the launches like product launches is like make it or break it for the company.
This wasn't the case for me. I was like this is a tool for me to get to my next
thirty usos, my next fifty users, and that's exactly what happened.
And so first product hand launch
We got like fifty, I got like fifteen new users. By the way, the second one
broke product and they thought it's like plenty of bots. We won the first product of the day and the first product of the month of the week, but it's the different story.
Um and so we got like fifty users and we got the first user to pay.
This was an insane an insane feeling because I'm a like an entrepreneur coming for like the enterprise space.
I was thinking that this is insane. Why would anyone pay for my product without meeting me, without like looking me deadly in the eyes or trying to get a discount and so on?
Obviously this user channel in like a few hours. Fort wasn't good back then.
Um
But
From there I started seeing some very slow growth.
I got my
First fifty and then twenty left, and then the other thirty started showing it with like other
US were really good.
And then I tried a bunch of marketing things.
Didn't walk.
Uh influencer post or paid or something like that and then
One of my friends
Uh was also a founder. Different
Different space told me, Hey, you know what?
I think it's really cool that you're building it on your own.
And that you'll like you'll try and to like
take a very different approach than than the usual VC funded. Why why don't you show
My content about that. Like
the end of the day, it's like you're gonna have this the same like your audience are builders, they're trying to build their own products or or maybe even businesses.
And it will likely resonate with them.
And so I started sharing the journey on uh LinkedIn and I remember like seeing posts uh like okay, there's this nice concept of building public
And people get really interested.
I think here in base forty four we had like this really nice
a synergy between
The building public and also my audience was like builders.
I if I was like building, I don't know, a product to attorneys
And probably this wouldn't wouldn't have made a lot of sense.
Once they started like showing
uh what I'm building in public and getting more users and improving their product tremendously.
I was so lucky, like the the community around base forty four is is nothing like I've ever seen. It's like so supportive. There's so much feedback and so
Form the
the loop of like improving the product. This is exactly like how
How people say should feel like is like people asking for features before you can actually build them.
They're getting so excited about your product. They're writing the nicest things people have tried like started writing, like, Hey, you changed my life. I wanted to build
I had that like those ideas throughout my life. I didn't have a like an an ability to do that or resources or money to pay for developers.
And then the other thing that I did it worked really well is
I've noticed that people really like showing what they're building.
Uh on top of base forty four, like they would write posts.
I remember at some point
A friend of mine reached out and he was like
Uh dude, how much are you paying those people to
to like write posts about space for phone I was like I'm not paying anyone, honestly. And so what I did is I actually
I I did this program in Side Base Forty Four saying hey if you shell
Just about the process of building the app or the app itself, it doesn't even have to be about base forty four. If you share it in social, you'll get extra credits to build.
And so those two
Um like building public and giving up credits.
worked extremely well.
And that's how we got growth going.
Okay, let's pause there. That was awesome. Uh how many users do you have at this point of the journey, roughly?
I think there was like two weeks.
between now a week
Between having like being on a pace of like twenty users a day
to seeing uh four thousand users come into your product like new users a day.
Um
break the portnut like it was hard scaling it.
Also there's like some things I needed to learn.
uh while moving is like I wasn't a DevOps engineer. I don't know how to scale databases. I didn't know that a virtual CPU
Would really come back at me when when trying to scale and so on.
Um, and again, trying to be profitable and so you you try to use every free tier that you can.
But then once you start scaling, it's really bad.
So yeah, I think
Once I started sharing
I public it grew to a few thousands.
Okay. A day.
And then for the credit thing like did the rest.
Mm. Okay. So this is kind of like the whole journey. I know there's a few other elements I wanna touch on, but let me
Point out a few things that stood out to me that I think might be helpful to folks.
The first is right at the beginning, the coming back to a lesson you shared at the beginning, which is build for specific people. So initially it was build for yourself, build for your girlfriend, build for the scouts program.
And then it was built for these like three friends.
Just building it, sitting with them.
Uh
Building the things they need to use it.
Which is really interesting because a lot of times the advice you get is look for
Look for poll.
Look for people.
With problems to solve.
Uh
Like you almost went the opposite. Like you're like, use my product. I need you as a favor, use my product and help me
Make it better.
Absolutely.
Also like
I don't know though. I think
Maybe paradigms are changing, but there's some things that I don't believe in, is like
MVPs
first and foremost is like if you're building something that people will not be able to use or is not good enough, especially these days where it's so much easier to build self tail, so the attention span for people to actually
Try out new software products is is is getting shoulder on shoulder. So
Yeah, peek a bunch of people.
That
I don't know, owe you something or or have any reason to use your product when when it's bad.
Build for them.
Biddle physically
I remember that even when we passed uh twenty K users, uh fifty K users and hundred K users, it was still very
tough to get the right feedback. So I would bring like twenty, thirty people to like a room together, like l almost like a focus group or a small hackathon. I'll do that every other week.
um just to get feedback and it was so much easier than any other thing and it was the same
thing that I tried developing when we were just like three users and five users.
And so yeah, build it for them. They can come from different backgrounds.
Again, something else that I don't really
empathize with or or agree with is like you have to have like a certain
I C P it's not a it's not necessarily about like the profile of a person, more of like what they're trying to do.
is like way more important so you can have different types of people
But they're all trying to do the same theme, right? They're trying to build a tool. I think some of this people should em remember the tool you're building is a specific kind of tool that helps you build things.
And so these lessons don't necessarily apply.
Uh in a lot of cases
You want to be really specific with I C P'cause there's like one thing you accomplish with this thing versus this very horizontal product. I agree. But I think that's still
Very good to know,'cause maybe for your product you hear all this advice. You need a very narrow focus, you gotta have a very specific role and company size and all these things.
You're like, Okay, maybe not. Maybe if your tool is something that a lot of people can use for a lot of different reasons.
Don't worry about that too much.
Okay, so
Step one, shared it with friends, a few friends, like
Force them to use it.
Please use this. I'm gonna watch you.
Your point about being there physically, I think, is really interesting.
Like don't just send it to them over email.
And s and ask them how Wendets like sit next to them and watch them use it and then keep making it better.
Then you tried this product call launch, another great lesson. You may fail on ProductCon, that's okay.
You still gain like you don't know, it sounds like you tripled your quadrupled your user base from ten to
Thirty ish in in a failed product launch. Product hot launch.
Uh you also said you've tried paid, which didn't work. You tried influencer marketing didn't work. So basically all the paid
stuff didn't work. But that's great. Great lesson. I think people generally don't want to be doing that kind of stuff.
The point you made about starting to share it.
In public?
I think is really interesting.
A lot of people
Post stuff on LinkedIn.
And no everyone like it's cringy. There's a lot of people sh building in public. Who cares? What are you building? I don't know. I don't care about what you're building.
What is it you think stood out about the way you approached it that
Is it this tool you built that tell you how to post really viral stuff? Uh what do you think you did that allowed
That made people care. Is it like the small community already part of an
Israel in the tech scene, like is that a big part of why I think it worked? Is there anything else?
that might be helpful to folks that are thinking about building in public and being successful there.
So first a disclaimer, I feel like I had some very small not audience, but like I had plenty of like LinkedIn connections before and so everything started from LinkedIn, right? Okay. Great.
Yeah, so now that the position still is is
getting crazy all over the world, so getting
A lot of followers from a bunch of like different different uh
uh social media platforms, but still we'll think Dean. I think
The fact that I was like the CEO of this company
Um
previously like had some people
around me and my connections, so again
You have to have like
You're writing to like
Something there, it's all the fun.
Few weeks ago.
Building public is great, right? But
But and and other I don't like
other channels can really walk, but at some point you have to like take a bet on one channel that you see it's walking. So like if you're writing
posts week over week and like you get five likes.
It's likely not gonna change drastically.
Um, so
And again, I tried a bunch of things.
Uh
Influence I didn't work, okay, I'll just put it aside for a second. Let's let's see if I can find a channel that works. And so
Yeah, I
In
For the building public I was trying to be
as honest as I could and and just write the good the bad and I think the also the fact that like I wasn't
Eventure
Like I wasn't a a V C funded company. I didn't try looking the best or show hey, look at my amazing metrics, or
Like make everything look like
really pink and really great, and I'm the fastest going whatever bootstrap company in the world. I think just riding
really about the good, the bad and the ugly, and just being very realistic and sharing the learnings along the way.
Again, that this is specifically for my audience, right? So my audience will build us and so I'm not sure
That it
Uh
Yeah.
Walks to any other
Forest category.
But yeah, just being very realistic and doing post from the
deepest like technical tech stack and how I optimize the Lelms to
Just sharing some uh some feelings or goals. People like to see numbers, people like to see charts.
And also
Even there, even in the building public, like I would ask my friends beforehand that they knew that they were the the target, like what do you think of this post?
Is it interesting? Is it not? Like do you get do you see value out of that?
And it's like almost like a product that you're releasing out there.
It's the same thing.
Okay. This is really interesting. So being being honest.
Really effective.
Feels like there's like this underdog element of being a soul founder and not

Adds to it. Also just sharing really interesting learnings.
Things you've learned yourself that
I'm innately people find interesting'cause you didn't know the stuff.
Uh and also just like fun stats and ground charts and things like that.
Building a tool on base forty four that
Can help you make these tweets better.
Also there I think it's important to note, you had a network a ahead of this, like you had people
You had followers, you had
connections, it wasn't like starting from zero. What's like a rough
sense of just like I don't know how large your network was, what's like a
way to think about that. So folks are like, Oh wow, I'm nowhere near that.
I don't think it was very big.
Um, I think it was like
Maybe a few thousand connections.
Nowadays it's few. Tens of thousands, but
Like he starts seeing some engagement and and once you do that, especially when you like saying, Okay, this is the channel that I'm gonna put
I'll like only wait.
Okay, that's a really important point too. It wasn't like put cross post to Twitter and Instagram all these things, it's pick one.
And just nail that.
Yeah, till this day I think the bike
Posting uh for me, posting on Twitter was was a waste of time.
I at some point like okay, I s I saw LinkedIn succeed and I was like, Okay, let's do the same thing on Twitter.
Now I have like a better following on Twitter, but
Yeah, like it was
It didn't really work so I was spending a lot of time well
Like from LinkedIn, I saw like a the the the highest Hawaii. And it could be very different for different founders, for different products. It could be Reddit.
It could be like uh opening opening up a sub stack, like it could be very different things.
For me that's what worked and like once you see something world, just double, triple down on that.
keep on like don't try to spray and play. It doesn't work at this stage. At least for me no.
That is really great advice.
It aligns with what I often see with
traditional growth engines, you there's like SEO, there's pay, there's sales, there's virality word of mouth.
And usually a company grows mostly through one.
And LinkedIn interestingly was your effector of growth.
Also just this incentives piece is really interesting, a really cool tactic. So the tactic here is
incentivising people to share what they built on base forty four and they get credit.
To build more.
I've never heard of that before. H how do you actually do that? Do they send screenshots or something? How do they get credit?
They sent me emails and I would tag them again with the
with an app and an L M, like there's there's supposed is a whole different topic that we can speak about for hours. Like how do you
Line support when you're solo, which is
A huge topic, but like I they would send um I would say, Hey, write a post
Um
Paste the link back, send me an email with like the link.
And and like and I'll give you credits.
And so at some point they automated that because they couldn't really manage like the the whole thing.
Uh but yeah.'Cause you couldn't really like connect to like their the social APIs and so on to Plus Hard So it's like
So send me the post.
I I know exactly what you mean with the support challenges of being a solo person with the newsletter of a million people, I get
Unless little things just come up. I I am really curious to hear you solve it. Let's not get into it.
In terms of being solo, actually I haven't asked this yet, how long were you actually solo?
When did you actually hire your first
First, second person.
Into the journey of the six months.
So the Phil Spells started two month ago, so a month and a half before the acquisition. So I was running mostly solo. I think but like
When when he started I already knew that that it's headed building.
To acquisition.
Yeah.
And also at some point
Like once I I like I uh like I saw that the chances chances of this happening
Alright, Glow, so
Yeah, I hired like the best people I know'cause I knew that like I have now this
Um
few ears, if not more, that like I wanna
Build an awesome like I have to
build this to be really big and I need
the right people around me and it's not anymore about like let's try and be
as profitable and as fun as possible. Like let's literally
Take a big ol' bet.
Um, and that's where I started like bringing in people that I knew.
Um
Best people that I knew to and like
Help me build that.
The way to deal is traps.
It's not that I can sh share a lot of details on us, like okay, does like the the eighteen mil that got published that's the initial payment and then
there's this airnote piece, which is really interesting because I think they we've structured the deal in a really win win situation.
Um
But then a lot of my compensation and a lot of like the upside is actually
Based on that.
Oh either than the eighty mil.
And so I have both the financial interest, also the personal interest in like building this to be as big as possible. So
The month before the acquisition
I had the team starting to scale. But also based on like became more profitable that I could afford myself to bring in more people.
The first hire was that an engineer or what they do?
Actually a product person.
Whoa. Like a product manager.
Yeah, well it's
It's someone was I I've I've been working with a lot and he's like a check of all trades, so he can
go into like LLM logs and look at like mistakes and fix the pawns. You can write uh Python script to analyze things that we do.
uh he can start implementing analytics into the product, so like a very technical
Uh
product person.
His name is Yoav. Um some point I was telling you, Hey, Yoav, uh you take golf now and it's like I haven't done golf.
Anywhere, right? Uh no, you take those now like try and and let's let's try new challenge.
those kind of things. So you want to bring in someone that at least the feel style that can do many different things.
Okay, that's really interesting.
Let's finish talking about growth and let me share stuff you've shared.
Already about what work
And then there's a few more things I read that you did that. I'm curious how big of a deal they were.
So
First you just grabbed a bunch of friends, used this product.
Use that to learn what to build.
You tried Product Hunt?
sort of effective early stages, it was ended up being really effective.
Then you had another launch that was like you said broke the broadcut algorithm.
Uh how many users did that drive to that? Was that like a huge inflection, that second product cut launch?
The thing is like things happen so fast that I didn't really implement any like data.
I don't really know how many how many
It was also bought, but I remember
I mean it feels like the the community around base foot is all again is like
one of the most incredible communities that I've seen is a very strong one and uh like the whole entire like the writing so that they all were very excited about the Productant launch and I was like let's kai rock it.
uh base for the phone then I wake up
And I see
The weirdest things like base forty four is not even in a top ten.
Um, and I was like, I know for his factors like
A thousand people already voted by the time'twas noon.
uh and Nunin Nisra light very early on. It's like I see people right, I see
More posts.
On LinkedIn.
Saying
People should vote to base forty four and they actually see up votes.
Um, and so till this day I don't really know what happened, so I
One of the community reached out to the support team.
uh for product ant
Uh, insane.
You guys should like check out your algorithm because something is not right. Like just even look at LinkedIn's like Searchful Base forty four product and like you'll see.
There many posts.
Uh I know late.
You know what?
You right, we fixed it and then we jumped to like the first place we were like
five hundred for up votes uh in the delta was five hundred uploads from the second place. Oh my god. I've never seen that.
Yeah.
So it was it was fun also seeing kinda like the
The community of the Elite.
Uh for for this.
Speaking of community, did was that all in WhatsApp, where did you manage this community?
What's up is
Is a surprisingly really good tool to get feedback from the community. Obviously, like it's not a great tool for the like the community is going
So fast, so it's blew past like
a thousand or two thousand or five thousand. I don't even remember what's the limit on WhatsApp.
Uh, but till this day, like the what's up
community.
Uh, which was like very early on is such a great place to get feedback.
Um, it's also even old enough, it was when when it first started out, it was my best
place to find out if the product is up, if there's like slowness, if there's like bugs,'cause people write like really fast and they can see that.
Um
But obviously at some point we turn to like more
uh scalable solutions like Discord, Reddit
Mm-hmm.
Yeah, those those things. Um, and then just keep on sending product updates via email.
Okay.
There's another couple of levers I've read about and then I'm gonna move on to a different topic.
One is this hackathon you mentioned that helped you grow and
And
become more aware.
Uh, the other is you did a bunch of partnerships.
Which is really rare for a company of your size. So just talk about those and and what that did to the business.
At one point one of the things I really liked about building base forty four is that I saw people doing like
building ups that will really like
uh incredibly positive and like doing really good in the world and so and and it's
I think something really interesting right now in Vibe
coding in general is like once you actually
scale software, you can also scale the impact the software does.
So you can have like non profits build themselves tools, you can have people that
Uh build
apps for education and neglected domains that didn't really have budget because it was like no business our ideal.
And once you open this up and make it super cheap to create software, then it's becoming
And so I wanted and this was like
early on, like we were at the
Five thousand ish, ten thousand ish users. Um
And so I say okay, well, you know what, let's do
A hackathon.
Uh well we open up for everybody to build like apps that do good in the world.
Um I had no budget back then. So I was like, Okay, this is gonna be a five K
hackathon, like the price is gonna be five K.
It was your own money you were gonna give away. Yeah, it was like the profits that that something they basically for did at the same time at that time and then
a lot of people started registering and and a lot of teams, uh it ended up being three thousand teams.
I said, like really big.
Think like the largest
I think it's the largest
For good hackathon.
I so far and then
Started getting
Um
sponsor requests because it went all over social
And all of a sudden I found myself
with a very like nice
Back then like smaller business partnering up with
Amazon with Google, with MongoDB, with Deloitte, like with really
Great companies.
uh that that one after another uh stood behind this um
Have a phone, which was so so fun.
Those are awesome teams.
Like
the ones that we partner up with, they open up their offices across the globe to have like teams
uh be dev and and the prices went obviously
Very high.
Um
I think this is this
Will likely be one of the the top moments in my career.
Yeah.
was very, very empowering. But like people built a lot, like interesting things. I remember this
Person building a tool for Grandmaus and
And Hul Alzheimer, um like she has Alzheimer's.
And
And like building an a an app which is essentially a game to help the grandmother to memorize our family members with like photos and names and like so many
Interesting and great and impactful applications.
I love that there's benefits to the hackathon route, which other vibe coding tools are taking.
Uh
Not just growth, but also just good feelings and
Just building community and seeing what people are doing, like meeting people, excited about what you're building.
So many side benefits.
Okay, before we move on from growth, is there anything else that's worth mentioning that worked really well, or just like the
Think that people think will work and just didn't work for you that d you didn't already mention?
The last piece, but people talk about that a lot, is that um
Velocity eventually is a golf engine. So uh like part of like building in public is
Wanna put content out there that people will like to see. And so we joked about it, but really true, people like to see charts and they like to see numbers. And
it gets them attached to like this project if they're saying, Oh, I wonder what's gonna be perfect next week or I wonder like
How much money is it losing and how can you optimize and like did you get
Attached to that.
Um
And I think also velocity is to some degree the same thing because if your product evolves really fast,
And you're putting features out there like every other day.
people get attached to that and and people like

Like it's I remember
I remember people commenting on my post saying, You know what, like it's moving so fast
I have to try it now.
Um and so this is part of it's like velocity solves so for so many things. Like most of my thoughts
Uh when
and still are when running base forty four is like how do we increase velocity? How do we increase velocity? It's gonna solve every
product problem we have were most of them
It's gonna solve some of your marketing challenges if you're smart about it and and you're putting the content out there and you're you're making everything like a mini launch.
I say I feel like that was also a great uh growth tool.
That is a really good point.
Uh clearly everyone in the space is is understands this as well.
I want to talk about the acquisition piece, but a couple of quick questions that have been on my mind. One is just what is the tech stack that you built on?
Because I think a lot of founders are like, What the hell do I build on? How do I what will help me move fast? So
Get as geeky as you want, just like what are the tools and infrastructure used to build base forty four?
Vender dot com. Oh my god. This is uh I like the honestly they're not paying me anything. I wish I would have invested all anything. I don't think I ever spoke to someone senior there. Um
Holy like this is uh this was so much fun to walk with and still is like uh
And maybe I mean my previous company we had like
large teams of DevOps building processes for us to push to production. So window.com is like um
How does it call like just um
It's a cloud.
I was like yeah, it's like a very like build on top of AWS you have a bunch of uh easy easy to manage processes.
Um and and easy to like start up web ups and and scale them and so on.
And it's just render. It's not like a fancy version of render. It's the word render.com. Oh yeah. I just looked it up. Okay.
Cool. Yeah.
So this is like everything that has to do with infrastructure and
manage the both the website, the platform and the applications itself because based on
Basefall for is like a complex ecosystem.
You have that the user applications that have to be isolated and separated from the platform, that has to be isolated and separated from the websites like
A whole
A whole thing.
Um
MongoDB is really good when you're vibe coding, especially when you're building a vibe coding platform, because uh schemas change a lot.
And it's not necessarily like
Use those L Ms don't
always understand what the user was trying to send so they keep changing the data schema.
Um
And I feel like just this has been the right choice.
Obviously cancer, but
Again, I was spending twenty, thirty percent of my time just optimizing
for making their whole repository
Uh LLM suitable. So uh by the way, this is those are concepts that I also implemented in in base forty four, but one thing that I kept doing is
I tried making the LM write as least code as possible.
Like when you're trying to implement a feature
D
try to get to a place where it can implement the feature entirely without you writing code, but that the LM would write least cause uh as least closer possible. Because then when the LM try to like when the AI tries to like
Implement the entire feature from scratch. There are more places where you can make mistakes or get confused.
There are more things that it needs to save in the context when you ask it for a follow up prompt or something like that. And so
I built a zery high level
very opinionated infrastructure, like code infrastructure, right? It takes care of like the entire thing. When you build a new feature, it takes care of like the entire like the
the CUD the authentication the database like everything that has to deal with that so that when you ask the LM to implement a new thing,
it writes very little code. And by the way, this is also true for base forty four is like
Provided the lamb with a really good
infrastructure and S DK and have the LM
Like
The LM still has the flexibility to write the entire feature because it's code.
But make it so that uh that it doesn't need to you to spit out too many tokens.
And obviously the other thing that has to do with all set does one uh
uh controversial take
Uh for me walking with the L Lambs is uh
Don't use TypeScript.
Use plain JavaScript, use JSX, uh, it's easier.
So models to
Light code this way, so
The front end for
Based for the four for the platform, I mean.
Um, is built in JS, not TypeScript.
And I feel like this has been working well.
Part of the reason why I haven't written a single line of HTML or or JavaScript in the past, like
Jesse does this really well.
Um and
Another thing that we'll do while walking with AI is
A lot like try to push as much
As possible in the same repository.
Instead of like separating the front end and the back end, it's easier to give like the contest context to the to the AI of like both what's in the back end and what's in the front end.
Um
Besides that
So my stack is like the back end is in Python.
feel like people can be very judgmental about that.
In terms of performance, I haven't gotten into performance issues and there's like a lot of
a lot of traffic to base forty four and every now and then people try to DOS B base forty four and still the server holds.
So I feel like if you're building it the right way.
I thought it's just a
Very great language to do that.
Another maybe interesting take is uh'cause there's many of the the
the new apps and products that are build being are being built to some degree around LLMs. So one of the things that I use is
for the LLM that actually writes code in base forty four, I use I use a mix of different models for different tasks. So Cloudflow, for example, does a really nice job with
First the initial problem like writing the app from scratch.
And everything that has to do with UI is just fantastic. Like design is great.
But then for example, Gemini is really good when when you get to a very complex uh or like very complex problem or we need to figure out an algorithm or
Cloud four got stuck in some bug loop, which happens a lot when you vibe code.
Um, so I have this pipeline that tries to
Figure out the user prompt and then um route it to the right L L M.
Uh, which I feel like has been working pretty well.
Wow, that was uh extremely interesting.
Uh in this routing, does this is this what you do within cursor or you do this within base forty four based on what the person's working on? Base forty four, yeah. I don't think also has this uh I wish they I think there's like maybe an an an auto
option for it, but I in base for this like when users ask that's awesome. Uh I feel
try to analyze what they're asking and then figure out what's the right to them to use. That is so cool.
So it's just Claude and Gemini. Those are the two they use for base forty four.
Yeah, well, all of those tools
Basically for Kelsey, all the vibe coding tools I use the same
uh paradigm or I don't know if you call it or method, which is like
You have the heavy guns, which is usually either cloth for or Gemini.
And then close for and Gemini.
usually um create a high level
uh solution or high level kinda like what changes do you want to make to the file so not writing
All of the file fonts scratch every time.
Kelsey does that baseball like uh so writing like the only the chunk of code
that needs to be implemented in high level then you you get like smaller, faster models
Like Flash or full mini for from open AI.
to implement to kinda like uh to patch the code inside the the file.
Okay.
One very tactical question in a completely different direction, uh product question.
Activation, getting people to an aha moment.
Feels like
Something that
Uh is core to retention.
Something that comes up a lot on this podcast.
There anything you learned about
Getting that right. Anything you did that was really successful in getting people to see the value of base forty four really quickly and and in that start sharing it, using it.
Here's one interesting thing that that
I learned it, I think.
uh was counterintuitive to me because you always like you always want to build the best product out of for your users.
Uh, but sometimes it contradicts the how moment or how fast can you get users to do that. So
First when when I like when
A few months ago, more than that, when base forty four started, before actually implementing your app, so you'd say something like Hey, create a a task management app.
And before implementing that, because a lot of times you get this
uh not super clear request from the user.
I'd show the user like
Dell M would first, before even writing code, it would first generate uh user flows.
Like almost like a PLD or like but something that's more digestible to folks who have
Like they're not coming from from the space.
Uh so it will generate user flows.
It will show it to you like hey you wanna create a
uh task and then you could you could say uh yeah so may maybe I wanna add some files and stuff like that. So
to show you what it's gonna generate to make sure that it understands you.
And then it'll take okay and then it will generate the app.
This was actually something I ditched.
Because
Too many users um
Even though it was good for them and it was the right product decision to do that because you'll you'll create like better apps doing it this way.
But the conversions to like get to the aha moment
Uh we're not super high. And also like not super like I think one of the the key to the aha moment in the vibe calling world or at least in base forty four is like
Holy shit, like it actually understood me and you see the app.
And if you have like a stage in the middle, it makes the surprise like slightly less surprising. So
I think I ditched that and that was a uh
Nice lesson that that
I don't know.
actually how to define the right way, but it's like get your users as fast as possible to their hard moment.
Sometimes there's a price to that.
Make sure it's not too big.
But sometimes there are price to that because
At least when you're building B to C and it's all new to me because I'm not
coming from the space, but at least when you're building B to C like the attention span is so
No.
Really?
Uh, so you want to get there in like a minute or two or three.
Uh and then from there okay later on
ramp up the features that you wanna you wanna actually put there
So that it can be like the right product for for your users.
That was an awesome insight. Thank you for sharing that. That's actually something that I think will help a lot of people.
Okay, final topic. I want to talk about the acquisition process. Uh
Founders often look at this as like the dream. Oh my God, I sold my company millions of dollars, but it I know it's always stressful and
Hectic and
wild and you know, the work only begins. You know you know, you're not like I'm off you have to keep building this thing.
So
First of all, just have the acquisition conversation start.
Weeks reached out. I think back then there's like a lot of folks from the community.
Um
Well posting saying hey, we should definitely buy base for this salt before it gets too big or something like that.
Um, even though like we're not
Playing or competing in the same category, but it was clearly gonna be a good thing. What was just the connection there?
First because of the Israeli like uh the Israeli ecosystem. Got it.
But yeah, so uh
Folks were building websites with base forty phones, so it's kinda like the same
the same thing. Obviously Wix as a yeah, obviously Wix as an incredible product um for building websites, but a different approach from from L M
Now definitely getting to
And so I got to
The management team like Weeks' management team is so friendly.
Um and such great guys. And I remember sitting there and the first I think the first sentence th that was
First thing that I wish I the C out
Uh told me it's like
Hey, everybody's been saying that we should buy you. Uh maybe it's least w it' worth the talk and we're here to help.
Um
And I think early on we
Explode.
Like at least
In my mind is like
Yeah, it seems like those are the that's that's a great team to work with. So definitely in the same space. There's a lot I can benefit from partnering up together. So it wasn't clearly an acquisition.
Um
Like on the acquisition path.
And uh Vish the CEO is like a very seasoned, very experienced and helped a lot of entrepreneurs.
in the B to C space and specifically in Israel to
Can I go and succeed? And so
I remember um meeting him for a few
Nights of late just
Uh eating some steaks and just
sharing about how to go based forty four and just
Literally just
Getting there to get an advice.
Um
And so at some point we saw first that we have
Great chemistry.
Both with him and with the rest of the team.
Which I think is really, really crucial, especially if they're buying
Uh solo
Like d this is a very unique case, but especially if they're buying like a small team
Um
I think it's crucial for the buyer to make sure or to feel like they're gonna have really good connection in chemistry.
with the foundos, with the key people, because eventually it's like
I remember like the key one of the key reasons where
We were like debating together whether whether I should I should join Wix or not like
One of the key things that we've put on the table is
Oh yeah, and it's gonna be a lot of fun walking together.
Um
And I think also being a person's gonna be fun to work with is the key.
Especially if you're la if you're not like a five hundred people uh company that someone's buying. And if you're like a big company and doesn't really matter, like you're buying the operations, you're buying the product.
If you're a small company they're just starting out and getting some great momentum
You have to be a person that people would love to like want to work with for the next few years. And so this was critical.
Um
I think the best like the best place, uh and this is not easy to get to to this position, but the best position to negotiate such a deal or or even to get there is to
be also very fine with the other path of not getting acquired. In some ways it's like it's weird, but it's like uh
It's like in dating. When you when you're on the first couple of dates you don't wanna show too much interest because then it's uh
I think also I was in a position that I was saying, Hey, if it walks out it's gonna be amazing and if not it's gonna be amazing, it's gonna be either either way fun. Or obviously I wanted it to work out.
Yeah, and the last thing I think is um
I don't know if it's suitable for everyone, but I'm very happy with the structure of the deal with the
Airnote piece because I feel like it's still
I still show up every day to walk and and it's been only two weeks, but so we're gonna be like this for wheels and like
I have uh uh personal investment in the business and its success. So it's really I feel like it's better than just
selling the business and uh just spending the the next few years and uh wanting to disappear.
I l I love that part of the deal. Uh you could be a billionaire if it does well enough.
Yeah, I uh I don't know the deals. But in theory. Um
Let me ask so I know a part of the story also is that when you're signing the deal
The uh the war with Iran basically broke out. Tell that story.
So I was trying to not
Uh I wasn't nervous for our deposits, but this like this is like a huge
Deal for me, right?
Probably will change my kids' life.
Um
And
When we kicked off the poes.
uh we wanted it to be fast. Elso is like it's not like base forty four was like a very old company with like a lot of baggage. It's like there's no legal, there's no like it was very easy.
The due diligence was very fast and
I remember us saying
to the to the lawyers and the to our great kind of like two films that we work with.
Uh.
It's like until f until thirsty night.
That's it. We're signing Thursday night. No matter what we do, let's do it. Like let's wrap it up and make sure that we're aligning to sign Thursday night.
And we get till Thursday night.
It's two AM.
We stopped fighting over like small details, um and the lawyers have agreed to everything.
And
I was like, Okay, just send it out for signatures. We said Thursday night.
And then lawyers were saying
Uh yeah, we agreed on everything, but we need still need to kinda like change the worlding and so on and with the very tires like we're not gonna do it the right way. Let's wake up tomorrow morning.
And do that. And I know that's like I don't know going to sleep and then four A.
And not something like hey a wall wall got.
I was doing the Iran and Israel and I was like
Again this is so classic. I'm sure that the dealer will like I'm not like I wasn't sure like a I was
I was like, Holy I can't believe this is happening. It's such it's such an insane kind of events, but everything will went fine from there. We woke up the next morning.
Um and sign the papers.
Um
Yeah, it was uh as I said before, it was definitely
the least bowing month that I had in my life.
I was just thinking back to exactly that phrase that you shared.
Oh man. There's just so many parts of the story that are so interesting. It's a hero a hero's journey.
Story in so many ways.
Yeah.
Mayor is there
Is there anything else that you want to leave listeners with, anything that we didn't touch on?
Um
Maybe just
Last piece of a negative advice.
four founders that are trying to be on this start on this journey are on this journey.
They think might be helpful to them.
So first before getting to the
If it does
Like the only thing that I would say really
If there's anyone from the base forty four community that's actually listening to this
I am so grateful, like this community has been so
Supportive
Um and many times I'm saying okay, maybe I did this right and that way, but I'll I don't
It's hard for me to think about what I did, uh
So many things right to get like this community behind the product. And so I'm gonna so grateful for the community. So if everyone's listening
Uh
Really? I'm I'm hoping to to sell everyone better.
Um
What not to do?
Um
Yeah, does does
Flyny don't

Just make sure that at least fifty percent of your time you work on s on the the parts of you that you really like and that you're really good at.
You know, there's like this
Plenty of ways of saying that and different diagrams that they show you is like what you're good at, what
What you want to do?
uh what's fun for you, what's energizing, what's not. I think fifty percent of it should be in like this sweet spot of
You're doing the thing that your uh genius had, like your genius zone or whatever they call it.
I know so funny because
That's what keeps you up, like showing up every day and it's unbelievably
Different.
Uh
then then being a very talented person and a very skilled person, but
doing things that you either don't like or uh and it's fine, like everybody does things that they don't like. And in every job does like those places, but
Keep yourself in the zone of of genius. Um
I think that's really crucial. Um and I
feel like in the last few months I've also met plenty of like uh
really great and friendly CEOs
Uh, even from the Israeli ecosystem like fault.
for public companies, right? Weeks and minded.com and Neto and so on.
And they're all
Like obviously they have to do a lot of different things and being CEOs of public companies, like uh you have to like
Manage a lot of things, a lot of to logistics and I don't know
bureaucracy, but
They all have
U not
Talk to like uh
major or to some degree major part of their job is doing something that they really like and they're really good at. It's like whether it's like product design.
Uh Widows like um
building a marketing machine or something like that. I think that's critical.
Yeah, that's the biggest thing. Um and also it's like
And you probably hear this not nowadays on every podcast, but it's the best time to build uh
Yeah.
And it's gonna be a really life changing just
starting out something that you really like. Well I feel like we're at the age uh at the start of an age is
gonna be bigger than the the revolution that the internet did. Obviously I think now it's becoming clearer to anyone.
And so just
Building what you want's becoming so much easier. Just do it, do something that you like. I think it's gonna be for
A lot of chances gonna be life changing, and if not, at least you'll have uh
Very little regret in the future.
Mayor I'm gonna skip the lighting round, but I'm gonna give you because it's approaching midnight your time, I wanna make sure you get some sleep. I'm gonna ask you one question. This is something I meant to ask earlier, but I didn't. Uh
Base forty four. What is
What is that about? Why did you call it base forty four?
This is the most like
Really the stupidest probably reason that you're here for a for a name behind a product. So again
Base for the fo uh was not intended to be like a very large scale, like the the global phenomena that it's becoming right now. I wanted to have base in the name.
Because I feel like that's gonna be the base of where people is gonna start um build software or or soft or cans and so on.
And obviously back then base dot com wasn't available and I didn't have money to buy like a very fancy domain.
So I started seeing like I think it was Cloudflow, I don't remember even
What domains.
uh provider was that that started showing me some numbers
My date of birth is February second.
And so uh base twenty two wasn't available and I say okay, let's double it.
And then baseful is like I like the sound of it. It's almost like base sixty four.
And for for uh the another dinner, it was like okay, base sixty four is one way to encode
uh data from from
from one type to another and it's like base forty four is gonna do the same
Like in code native language into software and I was like, Okay
Cleaks. Let's go with it.
Um it's good that it's memorable.
the the number in the name.
But there's no real, like very sophisticated uh reason behind it.
No, that's an amazing story. I love that I love that you like base sixty four was cool, but I guess I'll make there's a reason forty four could be cool.
And it's not even base forty two. There's all these like numbers around there that people know. And it's like, no, forty-four. Double my birthday, sort of like sixty-four.
Uh that's amazing.
Uh it worked. I guess I don't know. Maybe shows you the power of how a name doesn't necessarily make a huge deal.
Uh
Interestingly, a recent podcast episode was about how name can make a big deal. So there's both sides to it.
Mayor, this is incredible. Thank you so much for doing this. Uh congratulations on the outcome. I know this is just the beginning.
I know the product is only gonna get better.
What a fun place to be. Uh hope you get some sleep.
Um
Two final questions, where can folks check out what you're building? Is it just base4.com? Anything else they should know? And how can listeners be useful to you?
Just try it out. I think we're at a place where uh people really love the product.
For every user that we get, it turns out to be two or four later on because they're sharing it. So uh just try it out, base forty four.com and build something that you like. And if you have
A bit more time, just leave feedback so that uh we can make it better.
Amazing. Mayor, thank you so much for being here.
Thank you, Lenny.
Bye, everyone.
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